religion from some disaffection and revolt organized in the latter days by Satan. Most modern critics take a different view of the matter. They do not regard the various Scriptural writers who have dealt with this subject as having had any common inspiration or design. They believe that each writer from his own point of view, guided by mere human sagacity, gives expression in his predictions to his own individual apprehensions, or narrates as prediction what he already knows. Originally Antichrist is nothing else than the incarnate devil, and the idea of the battle of God with a human opponent, endowed with devilish wickedness, arose under the influence of historical conditions. It is the near political horizon which suggests the danger, or contemporary history the substance of the prophecy; thus the Antichrist of Daniel is Antiochus Epiphanes, that of St. John Nero, that of St. Paul some adversary of Christianity about to appear in the time of the Emperor Claudius.—Bibliography: S. Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages; W. Bousset, Antichrist.
Anticli´max, a sudden declension of a writer or speaker from lofty to mean thoughts or language, as in the well-known lines, quoted in Pope's Martinus Scriblerus on the Art of Sinking in Poetry as from an anonymous author:
And thou, Dalhousie, the great god of war,
Lieutenant-colonel to the Earl of Mar.
Pope, Addison, and Fielding were masters in this art of sudden descent.
Anticli´nal line or axis, in geology, the ridge of a wave-like curve made by a series of superimposed strata, the strata dipping from it on either side as from the ridge of a house: a synclinal line runs along the trough of such a wave.
Anti-Corn-Law League, an association formed in England in 1836 to procure the repeal of the laws regulating or forbidding the importation of corn. The object of the league was attained in 1846.
Anticos´ti, an island of Canada, in the mouth of the St. Lawrence, 125 miles long by 30 miles broad. The interior is mountainous and wooded, but there is much good land, and it is well adapted for agriculture.
Anticy´clone, a phenomenon presenting some features opposite to those of a cyclone. It consists of a region of high barometric pressure, the pressure being greatest in the centre, with light winds flowing outwards from the centre, and not inwards as in the cyclone, accompanied with great cold in winter and with great heat in summer.